Surgical tools and instruments used in the medical field, for example in surgery, dentistry, veterinary medicine, etc, are known, which are used for carrying out operations on the patient's body.
In order to be used, said instruments must be completely and accurately cleaned and sanitized, meaning that their surface must not present any type of foreign substance, bacteria or other elements that may cause pathological reactions in any type of patient.
Therefore, surgical tools must be cleaned again and sanitized accurately after each use, as well as packaged individually in sterile and sealed packages suited to be quickly opened to extract the tools at the moment of use by the surgeon or operator in general.
In particular, before undergoing the sanitization process, which usually is performed with high temperature steam or other chemical or thermal systems, the surgical instruments must be previously cleaned very accurately in order to completely remove any organic residues from their metal surface.
It is in the organic residues, in fact, if they are not removed before sanitization, that the molecule breaking process takes place during the heat treatment, with the formation of substances that affect the cleanliness and sterility of the surgical instrument and considerably increase corrosion problems.
In order to protect the health of medical personnel against possible infections due to contact, even if accidental, with infected surgical instruments, automatic instrument washing devices have been designed that are used for cleaning and sanitizing the instruments.
These devices usually operate in three steps. During the first step the surgical instruments are washed with suitable detergents and rinsed with water, which must ensure complete removal of the organic residues present on the instruments.
A drawback posed by the known processes using chemical products lies in that some of them, commonly used in washing cycles, are too aggressive against the stainless steel used for making surgical instruments and cause these to corrode.
Furthermore, the surgical instruments comprise portions of their surface that are smooth and other portions that are rough, for example at the level of the handpieces, where better hold must be guaranteed to the operator. Some surgical instruments also comprise interstices and small spaces according to the specific shape of the instrument and to usage needs.
Organic impurities accumulate in said interstices and on said rough surface and are difficult to remove with the known washing processes.
Due to the fact that the cleansing systems used are not perfectly effective, before the washing operations a manual mechanical operation is often necessary and this must be performed by a specialized operator. This operation consists in the manual brushing of the instruments, which subjects the operator to the risk of infections, due to possible cuts, abrasions, punctures or any other accidental event deriving from the brushing operation. Furthermore, the brushing operation does not always guarantee the complete removal of organic residues, since the tools used for this mechanical operation cannot always reach the contaminated interstices or cavities and/or sometimes the encrustation resulting from the drying of the organic substances are especially adherent to the surface.
For this reason systems are also known that use softening baths suited to favor the mechanical and/or chemical removal of organic residues from the most complex surfaces, however these methods are not always effective. The contaminations left, especially in the interstices and cavities, are then fixed with the sanitizing heat treatment and therefore the effectiveness of this last step, so important for the health of the patients that will be treated subsequently, cannot be guaranteed.
The second, neutralizing step, includes the use of acid products that serve to solubilize and completely remove the oxides formed during cleaning with detergents.
The acid solutions used, however, have also a corrosive effect, in particular at the level of the contact points between metal and metal or between metal and plastic, where the conditions may facilitate the occurrence of localized corrosion phenomena.
The third step includes the cleansing of the instruments with high temperature water, approximately at 90°, which may cause more marked corrosion effects at the level of said areas subjected to localized corrosion.
Therefore, the known processes and equipment for cleaning and sanitizing surgical instruments pose several drawbacks.